China Tom Miéville (; born 6 September 1972 in Norwich, England) is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" (after early twentieth century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigones. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published a book on Marxism and international law. He teaches creative writing at Warwick University.

Early Life and Education more less

Literary Influences more less

Miéville has indicated that he hopes to write a novel in every genre, and to this end has constructed an oeuvre that is indebted to genre styles ranging from classic American Western (in Iron Council) to sea-quest (in The Scar) to detective noir (in The City & the City). Yet Miéville's various works all describe worlds or scenarios that are fantastical or supernatural and thus his work is generally categorized as fantasy: Miéville has listed M. John Harrison, Michael de Larrabeiti, Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, Charles Williams, Tim Powers, and J.G. Ballard as literary "heroes"; he has also frequently discussed as influences H. P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and Gene Wolfe. He has said that he would like his novels "to read for [his imagined city] New Crobuzon as Iain Sinclair does for London." Miéville played a great deal of Dungeons & Dragons and similar roleplaying games in his youth, and includes a specific nod to characters interested "only in gold and experience" in Perdido Street Station as well as a general tendency to systematization of magic and technology which he traces to this influence. In fact, in the February 2007 issue of Dragon Magazine, the world presented in his books was interpreted into Dungeons & Dragons rules and on February 19, 2008 it was announced that Adamant Entertainment will be developing an RPG based on the Bas-Lag universe. In 2010, Miéville made his first foray into writing for RPGs with a contribution to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game supplement Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Miéville has explicitly attempted to move fantasy away from J. R. R. Tolkien's influence, which he has criticized as stultifying and reactionary (he once described Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature"). This project is perhaps indebted to Michael de Larrabeiti's Borrible Trilogy, which Miéville has cited as one of his biggest influences and for which Miéville wrote an introduction for the trilogy's 2002 reissue. The introduction was eventually left out of the book, but is now available on de Larrabeiti's website. Miéville's position on the genre is also indebted to Moorcock, whose essay "Epic Pooh" Miéville has cited as the source upon which he is "riffing" or even simply "cheerleading" in his critique of Tolkien-imitative fantasy.

Miéville's left-wing politics are evident in his writing (particularly in Iron Council, his third Bas-Lag novel) as well as his theoretical ideas about literature; several panel discussions at convention about the relationship of politics and writing which set him against right-wingers ended up in heated arguments. He has, however, stated that:

Awards more less

Politics more less

Bibliography more less

Novels and novellas

King Rat (1998)
Perdido Street Station (2000)?
The Scar (2002)?
The Tain (2002)
Iron Council (2004)?
Un Lun Dun (2007)
The City & the City (2009)
Kraken (2010)
Embassytown (May 2011)

? denotes novels set in the Bas-Lag universe.

Short fiction

"Highway Sixty One Revisited" (in Young Words, 1986)
"Looking for Jake" (in Neonlit Vol. 1, edited by Nicholas Royle, 1999)
"Different Skies" (in Brit-pulp!, edited by Tony White , 1999)
"An End to Hunger" (in Book of Internet Stories, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, 2000)
"Details" (in The Children of Cthulhu, edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams, 2002)
"Familiar" (in Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, edited by Peter Straub, 2002)
"Buscard's Murrain" (in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, 2003)
"Reports of Certain Events in London" (in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon, 2004)
"A Room of One's Own" (in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Oddest Jobs, edited by Christopher Golden, 2008)
Hellblazer #250, DC Vertigo 2008
"Jack" (in The New Weird, 2008)
"The Rope is the World" (2010)

Collections

Looking for Jake (collection, 2005)

Nonfiction

Introductions to Fiction by other Authors:

The Borribles: An Introduction, 2001.
Things That Never Happen: An Introduction, 2002.
Wizardry and Wild: An Introduction, 2004.
At the Mountains of Madness: An Introduction, 2005.
First Men in the Moon: An Introduction, 2005.
Dagger Key' and Other Stories: An Introduction, 2007.

Academic Writing:

‘The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety’, Historical Materialism, 2: 1—32, 1998.
‘Marxism and Fantasy: Editorial Introduction’, Historical Materialism, 10, 4: 39—49, 2002.
‘The Commodity-Form Theory of International Law: An Introduction’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 17, 2: 271—302, 2004.
Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, 2005.
‘Anxiety and the Sidekick State: British International Law after Iraq’, Harvard International Law Journal, 46, 2: 441—458, 2005.
‘Floating Utopias’, in Davis, Mike and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds.), Evil Paradises: Dreamworld of Neoliberalism ( New York: New Press), 2007.
‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire - Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?’, Collapse, IV: 85—108, 2008.
‘Weird Fiction’, in Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint et al. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge), 2009.
‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory’, in Mark Bould and China Miéville (eds), Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (London: Pluto Press), 2009.
‘Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism’, Finnish Yearbook of International Law, 18, 2009.

As editor

Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (co-editor), 2009.

Adaptations more less

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "China Mieville", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Total Books: 115

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